They can take the motorcyle club's weapons,body armor and their bikes after racketeering conviction but not their sacred symbol of unity, judge rules.
In this October 2008 file photo, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, at podium, speaks during a news conference in Los Angeles with the trademarked Mongols logo seen on a motorcycle at right. This week, a California federal judge refused to order the Mongols motorcycle gang to forfeit its trademarked logo, delivering a blow to prosecutors.
That’s the argument the government made as part of its decade-long campaign to dismantle the Mongols Motorcycle Club by taking away its prized motorcycle-jacket patches — in other words, their identity. In December, a jury convicted the club of numerous racketeering offenses, including murder and slinging narcotics. And the jury signed off on the feds’ seizure of the trademark to the club’s infamous symbol, which prosecutors argued would quell their incentive to commit crimes.
Stephen Stubbs, the Mongols’s lawyer, was elated. “This has been 10 years,” he told The Washington Post. “The government is trying to ban symbolic speech. ... That is literally what they’re trying to do.” The next year, the federal government indicted 79 Mongols members in its first RICO case, 77 of whom pleaded guilty to racketeering offenses. Prosecutors viewed it as a major victory, but ran into trouble when they tried to seize the Mongols patch. In 2009, a federal judge rejected their attempt, in part because none of the individual members charged in the racketeering case actually owned the trademark.
The image of that man with the shades and the mustache was emblazoned on T-shirts, on patches, on bikes, on leather jackets and tattoos. It may have been a mark of unity to Mongol members and former members, like a wedding ring binding them together — the “Holy Grail” of their relationship, as Stubbs said.
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